What Is Microsoft Copilot? The Complete 2026 Guide

Copilot, in Plain English

Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft's umbrella brand for its AI assistant, built into Bing, Edge, Windows, and the entire Microsoft 365 app suite — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. It started life as Bing Chat in February 2023 and was rebranded to Copilot later that year as Microsoft folded its various AI experiments under one name.

The confusing part is that "Copilot" now refers to several genuinely different products at different prices, and which one you're using changes what data it can see and what it costs. Understanding that family is really the whole story.

Which Copilot Is Which

There's also GitHub Copilot (a separate coding-focused product for developers) and Copilot Studio (a no-code platform for building custom AI agents, from $200/month per tenant) — both distinct from the assistant described above, despite sharing the name.

The Retirement of Copilot Pro

The one change worth knowing if you've read an older guide: Microsoft retired the standalone $20/month Copilot Pro plan in late 2025, with support ending August 1, 2026. Its features moved into Microsoft 365 Premium (about $19.99/month), which is now the plan individuals should look at for AI inside their own Office apps. Existing Copilot Pro subscribers keep access only until they cancel or the support window closes.

Inside the Apps You Already Use

In Word, Copilot drafts, rewrites, and summarizes documents. In Excel, it explains formulas, analyzes data in plain English, and now handles agentic multi-step edits. In PowerPoint, it builds full slide decks from a prompt or an existing document. In Outlook, it drafts and summarizes email threads. In Teams, it summarizes meetings in real time and generates action items automatically. The business version grounds all of this in your actual work data — your files, your emails, your meetings — rather than just the open web.

How It Fits Among Other AI Tools

Copilot's core differentiator isn't raw model quality — it's distribution. It's already sitting inside the software hundreds of millions of people use for work every day, which means adoption doesn't require choosing and installing a new tool. Where it's weaker than a dedicated chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude is general-purpose conversation depth and coding; where it's stronger is grounded, in-context assistance inside a document you're already editing.

Getting Started Without the Confusion

Because of the naming overlap, the most common mistake is signing up for the wrong tier. If you just want to try AI chat, the free version at copilot.microsoft.com needs nothing more than a Microsoft account — no credit card, no trial period to remember to cancel. If you specifically want Copilot inside Word, Excel, or Outlook on your own personal files, that requires Microsoft 365 Premium, not the free chat tier, since the free version deliberately doesn't touch your Office documents. For a business rollout, IT admins should start with a permission audit before deploying licenses broadly — Copilot surfaces whatever a user's existing permissions already allow it to see, including anything oversharing might expose, so it's worth a review before turning it on for a whole team.

Copilot Studio and Agents

Beyond the assistant most people think of, Microsoft also sells Copilot Studio, a separate no-code platform for building custom AI agents that can carry out multi-step tasks on their own — things like triaging support tickets or pulling data from multiple internal systems into one summary. It's priced separately from the main Copilot tiers, starting around $200 per tenant per month with additional usage billed through Copilot Credits, and it's aimed at IT and operations teams building repeatable workflows rather than everyday chat users. Over 230,000 organizations have reportedly used it to build agents as of 2026, according to Microsoft's own figures, though it's a genuinely different product from the Copilot most individuals interact with day to day.

From Bing Chat to Copilot

Copilot's roots go back to February 2023, when Microsoft launched Bing Chat as an experimental AI-powered addition to its search engine, built on early GPT-4-era technology from its partnership with OpenAI. That September, Microsoft rebranded the assistant to Copilot and began weaving it across the company's product line rather than keeping it confined to Bing. Since then, Copilot has effectively replaced Cortana as Windows' built-in assistant, expanded into every major Office app, and picked up its own dedicated hardware signal — a physical Copilot key now ships on many new Windows keyboards, sitting alongside the traditional Windows key.

That rapid, product-line-wide rollout is exactly why the naming gets confusing: Microsoft moved fast to put the Copilot brand everywhere, and the pricing and capability structure had to catch up and get reorganized more than once along the way, most recently with the July 2026 licensing changes and the retirement of the standalone Copilot Pro plan discussed above.

Clearing Up the Last Bit of Confusion

Even after all of the above, a few practical questions tend to linger. Can you use the free version alongside a paid one? Yes — a business user with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license still has access to the free chat experience for anything that doesn't need their organization's data. Does upgrading from free to paid require switching apps? No, the interface stays largely the same; what changes is what data it can see and which advanced features unlock. And does canceling a paid tier delete your chat history? Generally no for the consumer plans, though it's worth checking current terms, since policies around data retention after cancellation can change between Microsoft's licensing updates.

Common Questions